Chapter 3- Lecture Flashcards
Should contemporary social theories be thought of as completely separate from classical theories? Why?
No, because they draw on each other in their formulation.
What theme most commonly runs through modern theories?
power
What are the 6 contemporary theories?
1) Western Marxism
2) Feminist Theories
3) Post-Structuralism
4) Queer Theory
5) Post-Colonial Theory
6) Anti-Racist Theories
How did Antonio Gramsci diverge from Marx?
In his analysis of how the ruling class ruled: through ideology, not just material.
What is Gramsci’s domination /
Physical and violent coercion commonly exerted by the police and the military
What is Gramsci’s concept of hegemony?
Ideological control and manipulation.
According to Gramsci, what do society’s dominant ideas reflect?
The interests of the ruling class.
What is the most important thing that hegemony involves?
Consent
How does the ruling classes ideas become common sense (hegemony)?
Through the ideas we adopt.
True or false: Hegemony is a process that is constantly negotiated and renegotiated?
True
What involves active consent via allegiance of the masses?
Hegemony
What is used as a way to explain how particular features of social organization come to be taken for granted and treated as common sense?
Hegemony
What is Gramsci’s Superstructure divided into?
The state and civil society.
What is it called when the prevailing consciousness is internalized by the population and becomes commons sense.
Hegemony
What is cultural hegemony in Marxist philosophy?
The term cultural hegemony describes the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class, who manipulate the culture of that society–the beliefs, explanations, perception, values, and mores–so that their ruling-class worldview becomes the worldview that is imposed and accepted.
How does cultural hegemony function?
By achieving the consent of the masses to abide by social norms and rules of law by framing the worldview of the ruling class, and the social and economic structures that go with it, as just, legitimate, and designed for the benefit of all.
How do we consent to hegemony?
By voting, purchasing, and participating.
Feminist theories are a system of___and___practices.
- ideas
- political
What do feminist theories differ in?
Their explanations of women’s oppression and the nature of gender and in their ideas about women’s emancipation.
Is there one single feminist theory?
No
What is the core concern of all feminist theories?
Gender oppression
What did feminist theory evolve to include?
Evolved to look at issues of all marginalized people, not just women.
What does feminist theory believe about equal status?
Women and men should be equals.
Why do men have an interest in maintaining their social privilege over women acc. to feminist theory?
Because men have social power
Feminist theory looks at how women and men and their roles are___ ___.
- socially
- constructed
Who is Dorothy Smith? What three things does she look at/critique/claim?
- A Second Wave feminist
1) Everyday lives of women
2) Critical of androcentricity
3) Claims women are left out of the production of knowledge.
Who is bell hooks?
A Third Wave feminist
What is the pink tax?
Women have to more than men for virtually identical products (ex. razors and deodorant)
What is Foucault’s post-structuralism concerned with?
How knowledge is socially produced.
What three areas does Foucault’s post-structuralism look at?
Power, knowledge, and discourse.
What is Foucault’s power?
Created within social relationships, multidimensional, found everywhere, and always at work.
What can Foucault’s concept of knowledge never be separated from?
From relations of power.
What are discourses acc. to Foucault?
Guide how we think, act, and speak. They tell us how the world is and how it ought to be.
What are some examples of discourses?
Health, beauty, desire, consumerism, leisure, “political correctness”, femininity and masculinity, work ethic.
What is discipline acc. to Foucault?
How we come to be motivated to produce particular realities.
How does power operate acc. to Foucault?
By producing some behaviours while discouraging others.
What does discipline (form of power) work through?
Surveillance
What is surveillance acc. to Foucault?
Acts of observing, recording, and training.
What is normalization acc. to Foucault?
A social process by which some practices and ways of living are deemed normal and others abnormal.
What does queer theory problematize?
The standard of equality based on sameness.
What are the three main areas of queer theory?
Desire, language, and identity.
What do queer theorists believe about desire?
Aims to disrupt categories of normal and acceptable sexuality.
What does queer theory believe about language/
- Unable to capture whole truth of reality
- Operates with a logic of binaries (e.g., normal vs. abnormal)
What does queer theory believe about identity?
- Social production (production social reality)
- Constructed through social relations and discourse.
What does post-colonial theory focus on?
The political and cultural effects of colonialism.
What is imperialism?
What happens at home
What is colonialism
What happens away from home.
What does the “post” suggest in post-colonial theory?
Suggests a focus on events that happened after formal colonialism ended in the early 1960s.
What is Canada and internal colonialism?
Indigenous Canadians
What is Edward Said’s orientalism?
A Western style of thought that creates a false opposition between the Orient (East) and the Occident (West).
What are the 3 types of orientalism acc. to Said?
1) Academic Orientalism
2) Imaginative ORientalism
3) Institutional Orientalism
What is Academic Orientalism?
- Knowledge produced by academic, government, experts, etc.
- Anyone writing and producing information on the Orient
What is Imaginative Orientalism?
Representations including art, novels, poems, and images that make a distinction between the Orient and the Occident.
What is Institutional Orientalism?
Institutions created by Europeans such that they could gain authority over, alter, and rule the Orient.
What are the 6 principles of Critical Race Theory?
1) Racism is endemic to American life
2) Acts of racism are not individual, isolated, random acts
3) Insists on contextual/historical analysis of the law
4) Value in drawing on experience
5) Interdisciplinary
6) Intersectional
What is theorizing whiteness?
Whiteness as a racial identity.
What is Richard Dyer’s Whiteness claim?
-Whites thought of as simply people while non-white are understood as distinct races.
What is white vs. non-white an example of?
Binary construction
What is Anthony Giddens’ globalization?
Transformation of time and space in our lives.
What is Giddens’ time-space distanciation?
The separation of time and space which allows social relations to shift from a local to a global context.
What are Giddens’ disembodying mechanisms?
Mechanism that aids in shifting social relations from local to global contexts.
What are symbiotic tokens acc. to Giddens?
Mediums of exchange (e.g., money)
What are expert systems acc. to Giddens?
Systems of knowledge on which we rely but with which we may never be directly in contact.